Post-Menopausal Love Poem That Begins with Guilt and Ends with Air Plants
These days I know I don’t give you back nearly enough: a mere
finger of affection where it used to be an entire hand of love.
Flinches and instincts for flights instead of eager spread-eagles.
These days I struggle to remember when we were so ripe that we
jellied for each other, when your mother called us mezuzahs, the duple
knuckles of our lips glued to the doorways of our bodies. Wells of faith.
These days I desiccate, I shrivel, I prune on the pit. I am always a winch,
wincing away, prima ballerina assoluta of modern marriage, fast and fickle
palms positioned just above the flash-bang of my twice-emptied womb. Yet
such envy I have of your orchids, blooming as you spoil them with your sun,
shy though they are of direct light, the bromeliads that you shower with food like
alms, the tillandsia you drown with daily devotions. How still they flower for you.
Jen Karetnick‘s (Twitter: @Kavetchnik; Instagram: @JenKaretnick) fourth full-length book is The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, September 2020). She is also the author of Hunger Until It’s Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023); The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize; and the chapbook The Crossing Over (March 2019), winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, in addition to six other collections. Karetnick has won the 2020 Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, the Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among others, and has been an Artist in Residence in the Everglades, a Deering Estate Artist in Residence, and a Maryland Purple Line Transit grant recipient. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has work appearing recently in Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, december, Michigan Quarterly Review, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Based in Miami, Jen works as a lifestyle journalist and is also the author of four cookbooks, four guidebooks, and more.
… return to 2021 Poetry Contest Issue Table of Contents.